VLVL [8] When BV possessed her

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

> Paul Mackin wrote:
>
> It helps a little. We've had precious little guidance up to now.  I don't
> think we are really ever meant to understand. Don't think P would be
> presumptuous enough to try to explain Male/Female relations. It may be
> better we don't know. Like making sausage. As I said before ambiguity is
> the watchword (IMHO). Frenesi sees Brock both as master and needy little
> child. Brock sees Fren as both impossible dream and slavey.
>
>                         P.




Ambiguity is the watchword, however, PREP (Political Reeducation program) is
“Brock’s own baby, his gamble,” and BV’s “genius was to have seen in the
activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires
for it.” In the youth revolution BV saw a deep “need only to stay children
forever, safe inside some extended national Family.” The Kids simply “needed
some reconditioning.” He goes to the camp to catch “sight of Frenesi among
them” to be “her inescapable witness, watching her in a context she couldn’t
deny-the rest of them, all she had for human company, as they were.” Yes, as
Roscoe reminds us, this is BV “ playing out one more of [his] confusing
power-and-sex games. This chapter opens with an important question: “When had
BV ever possessed her[F]?” The answer, obscured and shaded by the depraved
suspicions of our obsessed federal prosecutor [BV], and the manic medley of
metaphoric narrative in Ch7, which recounts when “There might have been about
a minute and a half, just after the events at College of the Surf, the death
of Weed Atman, and the fall of PR3,” resolves many of the problem and
mysteries surrounding the relationship of F and BV. BV’s “Baby,” PREP, “the
long-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small
children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends’
fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their
questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in
their eyes
the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who’d feel lets face
it, much more comfortable, behind fences,” are  “Children longing for
discipline.” Does F belong “among them?” Roscoe says, “these birds in this
facility here, for instance, seen these kids close up-some of ‘em’s in it for
real, all right, and they’re tough cookies, long hair and all. Never
turn’em-never trust ‘em if you do.” BV says, “They’ll get remanded someplace
else-we always knew what to do with them.”  Is F one of them? Or is she to be
counted “among them” –“that other 90%, amateurs, consumers, short attention
spans, out there for the thrills, pick up a chick, score some dope, nothing
political.” These kids say, don’t trust anyone over thirty-their conservative
parents. F is “third generation lefty.” What’s she in it for? How’s her
attention span? How does her Baby and BV’s Baby fit together? I think there is
more to this confused-sex-game then BV’s rapture and F’s postpartum
depression. How about their dreams, their fears, their sexuality, death/birth,
their gun/camera/penis? What happened in that “minute and a half” when BV
possessed her? When she was split in two, when Weed was shot? Did BV more than
taste the innocent math man’s creative juices in F?

Terrance